My friend David Glenn at the Chronicle of Higher Ed forwards this paper on government responses to natural disasters. The upshot is that in the wake of events like Hurricane Katrina, it becomes politically inevitable that the government will pour money into relief for the inadequately insured, but that it typically does so in an ad hoc, inefficient way. Their suggestion is that we may as well institute some kind of mandatory public catastrophe insurance, with risk based rates, to deal with these occurrences in a more systematic way.

The interesting thing here is that in a sense it embodies two distinct kinds of paternalism: In part, it’s protecting people from their own lack of foresight—though given our tendency to rush in with relief even absent such a program, this may be rational for them. But what they’re proposing would also count as a kind of paternalism the body politic imposes on itself: We know we won’t be able to resist relief expenditures, even when it might be better to decide that we won’t in order to encourage people to make provision for themselves. So we take the temptation off the table by requiring insurance.

On the one hand, I see some appeal to this insofar as it does sound like it might be an improvement on the status quo. But it also bears a disconcerting resemblance to a lot of other creepy arguments familiar from the public health sphere: Your smoking habits, your diet, your sex life all become matters for public concern because the public will foot the bill if you get sick. And, as my friend Glen Whitman used to say, your generosity can’t be an excuse for limiting people’s freedom.

Update: As my friend Kevin rightly points out, the “risk-based rates” qualifier in the first paragraph is both vital and, alas, probably not that realistic politically over time. As with federal flood insurance, there’s the very real risk of actually encouraging people to live in riskier areas by underpricing the insurance.